Services such as the Twitter® micro-blogging and social networking service and the Yammer® micro-blogging and social networking service provide users the ability to easily provide status updates (e.g., answer a simple question such as “what are you doing right now?” or “what are you working on right now?”). These services also allow other people to “follow” specific users in which they are interested to thereby receive status updates sent by those users. One issue with these services is that when the follower-followee graph becomes large and sparse, it is very difficult for users to sort the status updates by importance and/or relevance.
The recent release of the Twitter® Geo Application Programming Interface (API), which allows status updates to be tagged with the latitude/longitude from which the status updates were sent, creates an opportunity to view, search, and organize status updates via location. However, viewing status updates by location, for example within a set of map boundaries, still suffers from not being able to effectively organize all of the potentially relevant status updates available to the user. A map-based status update query will generally show too many irrelevant status updates within the map boundary and no status updates sent from locations beyond the map boundary regardless of their relevance. As such, there is a need for a system and method that enables users to obtain relevant status updates.